Software Testing: Is it Still a Relevant Profession?

Currently, software testing as a career seems to be in peril, as the advent of the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) practices in software vending is making independent software testing somewhat irrelevant. The current trend among organizations is to build, test and deploy software with as little cost and in the shortest time possible. The trend is due to the continuously accelerating pace by which businesses demand innovations, making it a must for software solutions providers to reach the market as early as possible.

Shorter delivery cycles though, tend to degrade software quality, which is why more and more organizations are into building Minimum Viable Products or MVPs. In doing so, early users or adopters become the testers of pared down versions of promising software. Through early user feedback, software engineers will have been provided with relevant guides on what to work on as MVP enhancements.

Other software organizations employ automated testing as a way of accelerating release, and at the same time deliver quality software. Automated testing though is ideal for large projects, usually those that initially passed through the manual testing process.

As a tool, automated testing is pyramidal as it occurs in three levels, from the most basic features that build the foundation of a software, to the Application Program Interface (API) which tells how components of a software are to interact in order to provide the features or services promised by the software …The final test is on the Graphical User Interface (GUI), which enables device users to navigate and interact by way of graphical icons and secondary notations, as alternatives to text or command-base navigations. Here, the length of time needed to test the higher layers is automatically reduced.

The Role Software Testers Must Play in Order to Stay Relevant

One of the misconceptions about choosing software testing as occupation is that the profession will furnish them plenty of opportunities to develop skills in programming. In today’s real world, software organizations require continuous testing as a discipline, by testing early, frequently and after. Delivery at a faster pace makes a company competitive only if quality has been assured.

In order to stay relevant therefore, software testing as a service must be maintained as one that is akin to performing roles that a programmer inherently undertakes. It is not just about running standard stress, performance, functional and scalability testing processes. Moreover, testing as a service can be provided both manually and automatically and in different web and mobile environments.

As profession, current job descriptions for software testers include, but are not limited to, writing and executing test scripts, assessing codes, designing tests for mitigating risks, troubleshooting for problems, working on multiple projects all at the same time, whilst committing to complete work within project deadlines.